98 - BlackBerry CEO John Chen; Plus, How to Beat Amazon

This week on the podcast: Danielle Weisberg and Carly Zakin, co-founders and co-CEOs of the Skimm. Their core product? The Daily Skimm, a newsletter targeting millennial women that keeps you up to date on what's happening in the world. They didn't invent the daily newsletter by a long shot, but Weisberg and Zakin are working the kind of magic with it that should make every media executive in the world sit up and take notice. Here's a little context: The New York Times announced recently that it has 13 million subscriptions to its 50 newsletters. Weisberg and Zakin have 5 million subscribers who open their one newsletter multiple times per week. I caught up with Carly and Danielle at The Skimm's headquarters on 23rd Street in Manhattan, to talk about their journey as business partners and friends, the roots of their entrepreneurial drive, and today's unique challenges for women in the startup game. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

10 Juli 201752min

Mike Tuchen is the CEO of Talend, a company with a billion-dollar market value. It helps customers take advantage of their data and apply it effectively. But before kicking off a career that's included an executive stint at Microsoft and a turn as CEO of Rapid7, he was nearly kicked out of boarding school and had to figure out how to make a contribution as the runt of his Brown University rowing team. Tuchen joined the Fortt Knox podcast to share a story that's not your typical wunderkind-makes-good tale. His story shows that when the pressure is on, believing in your unique talent can be the key to tilting the odds in your favor. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

2 Juli 201727min

It's been about 10 years since the debut of the modern smartphone, when Apple's iPhone first went on sale. One of the companies that has most defined this decade? Qualcomm. Leading the charge at Qualcomm for most of that time has been executive chairman Paul Jacobs. His father Irwin co-founded the company, and Paul helped build it into a power broker in mobile computing. Qualcomm designs the chips that serve as the brains for most premium Android phones, and its patented technology is in pretty much every smartphone on the market. That has earned the company a stock market value that's now over $160 billion. I sat down with Paul Jacobs at CNBC headquarters for a conversation about some of his defining moments, and what's next. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

25 Juni 201743min

It's a story of ambition, innovation, management gone wrong: Uber. It's been a ride-hailing game changer, but also a cautionary tale, so this week on Fortt Knox Live, I brought together an expert panel to discuss the latest news and what it means for Silicon Valley. Mike Issac of the New York Times, Vivek Wadhwa of Carnegie Mellon, and my colleague Deirdre Bosa of CNBC joined me in San Francisco this week to break down the big changes coming for Uber's management, and what the rest of us can learn. Here's our conversation: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

18 Juni 201732min

There's a story about former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer throwing a chair across his office and hitting a table with it. This story has become a piece of Silicon Valley lore. Now, Microsoft is not in Silicon Valley. It's in Washington State, near Seattle. But the story is a piece of Silicon Valley lore because of the reason Steve Ballmer allegedly threw the infamous chair. He wasn't aiming at a person. He didn't hate his table. He was fired up, because one of his engineers was leaving to take a job at Google. Google! And Google IS in Silicon Valley. The guy is passionate. One project he's spending time on in retirement: USAFacts. It's a trove of information about where our federal tax dollars really go – you can find it at USAFacts.org, and play with the numbers yourself. Ballmer started digging after his wife asked him to get more involved in the family foundation's charitable work. Ballmer is passionate about making sure kids have the opportunity to do better than their parents did financially. I asked him if that passion is what motivated him to do a massive data project. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

10 Juni 201720min

To say Tom Siebel has had an interesting life would be putting it mildly. He’s a billionaire, a tech visionary, and the survivor of an elephant goring eight years ago that, by the odds, should have killed him. Several doctors told Siebel he would never walk again, much less sail competitively. But he does. So what do you learn about life when you’ve stared down death in the form of a five-ton elephant, been crushed by that elephant, and lived to tell the tale? What do you learn when you’ve invented one of the first killer workplace apps of the PC era, then sold it for about $6 billion dollars? After you’ve made all that, survived all that, why, at 64 years old, are you still inventing? Tom Siebel, now the CEO of C3 IoT, sat down with me for the at the Nasdaq Marketsite in Times Square to share some insight into what’s made him tick – and what’s helped him succeed. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

3 Juni 201740min

Today she sits at the helm of a promising cybersecurity company. But first Nicole Eagan had to survive the dotcom bust. Eagan is CEO of Darktrace, a startup that battles hackers using software that gets smarter over time. Invented by mathematicians and former British intelligence operatives, the technology, much like a human immune system, looks for signs of odd behavior in a client's network. Eagan and Darktrace are on the cutting edge not only in security, but also in a gender-balanced tech workforce. Eagan says half of her employees are women. She knows how unusual that is, having operated in Silicon Valley through booms and busts … as an enterprise tech worker, a venture capitalist, and now as an executive. Nicole Eagan sat down with Fortt Knox to share lessons from efforts that worked, and efforts that didn't. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

29 Maj 201745min

You've probably heard of TaskRabbit – the online service lets you pay a contractor to run an errand, clean an apartment, put together an Ikea bookshelf – any number of odd jobs. Before there was Uber or Airbnb, TaskRabbit birthed the so-called "gig economy." You might not know that Kevin Busque co-founded TaskRabbit with his wife, Leah, who he is quick to admit was the brains behind the operation all along. In an unusual twist on the typical Silicon Valley story, Kevin and Leah were high school sweethearts, married right after college. They worked at the same company more than once, bootstrapped a business together, and eventually moved across the country to realize the Silicon Valley dream. Leah served as CEO of TaskRabbit for years, and is now executive chairman. Kevin recently launched a new venture, Guideline, a 401(k) platform. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

21 Maj 201742min